503 Service Unavailable — Bitnami WordPress on AWS
Service Unavailable
The service is temporarily unable to service your request due to maintenance downtime or capacity problems. Please try again later.
Additionally, a 503 Service Unavailable error was encountered why trying to use an ErrorDocument to handle the request.
Looking to migrate my blog’s domain name, I encountered this error.
As it turns out, my Bitnami WordPress blog, created on AWS LaunchPad, had been down all year.
What follows is a description of my diagnostic process, useful links, and how I identified and solved an AWS storage issue.
Step 1: SSH into your EC2 Instance
If you’re experiencing this problem, your site will be down and you won’t be able to load the WordPress control panel. The alternative is to SSH in and solve the problem through the terminal.
The AWS docs have a guide on SSH’ing into EC2. If you’re on Windows, I would specifically recommend using their PuTTY steps.
A few things to note:
- You’ll need to locate the private key. Mine was called wp-ssh-ppk.ppk. If you’re having trouble finding it on your computer, try the everything app.
- Bitnami WordPress runs Ubuntu, so your hostname will be ubuntu@ec2 (…), not ec2-users@ec2 (…).
Step 2: Diagnostics
My initial thought was to try solutions from this WPBeginner article. It suggests removing your plugins and switching to a default theme.
This is easy enough in ubuntu. Navigate to bitnami/apps/wordpress/htdocs/wp-content with the cd command.
Next, you can mv plugins plugins-old, then mkdir plugins. That’s when I ran into the ‘No space left on device’ problem.
If you didn’t experience this, the article also suggests you cd to themes, make a copy of your theme folder, then rm-rf it.
Step 3: Modifying EBS
To address the space issue, I followed the Bitnami docs on modifying EBS volumes, doubling the size from 10 to 20 GiB.
After restarting the instance, I took the Public IPv4 address, opened it, and I was back!
Step 4: Cleaning Up
The Bitnami docs have you start and stop your instance, switching your Ipv4 address and DNS.
This means two things:
- You need to update the IP address with your DNS provider — probably AWS Route53.
2. If you want to SSH back in, your hostname will be different.
To restore my plugins, I returned to the directory and ran mv plugins-old plugins.
Hope that helps!